INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA (1995)

INSTITUTE BENJAMENTA

or This Dream People Call Human Life

Gottfried John / Alice Krige / Mark Rylance / Daniel Smith / Joseph Alessi / Jonathan Stone / Ceasar Sarachu / Peter Lovstrom / Uri Roodner / Based on the novel ‘Jakob von Gunten’ by Robert Walser / Art Direction Alison Riva / Costume Design Nicky Gillbrand / Production Design Jennifer Kernke / Editor Larry Sider / Original Soundtrack Lech Jankowski / Producer Karl Baumgartner / Directors The Quay Brothers

Duality is the key to the works of the Brothers Quay, their films can be viewed in two quite opposing, though equally legitimate ways. That is, as deeply profound pieces, with a haunting intensity of perception.. or a collection of disparate moments that appeal on a purely esoteric level. Either way, the result is beautiful and sublime. To be honest, on the whole I’ve never been all that keen on their stop-frame shorts, as blasphemous as that is to admit, given the brothers iconic status in the animation world.. but they’re just a little too pretentious for my liking.  That brand of Eastern European animation was quite draining even in it’s original form, let alone in regurgitated homage. One imagines the younger Quay boys collecting milk-bottle tops, in mesmeric rhapsodies over spinning toys and purposefully breaking the keys on the family piano, just to delight in it’s jarring off-notes.. although in reality they were probably dissapointingly normal.

Institute Benjamenta uses some of the same imagery and stop-frame effects as their earlier short films, but better manages to achieve something more substantial and mature, hypnotic rather than monotonous. A steady rhythm pulses throughout weaving a dream-like sensation that both embraces and disturbs in equal fashion. 

Based upon Robert Walser’s semi-autobiographical experiences attending a Berliner school for servents in 1905, ‘Benjamenta’ is as much a journey into the mind of the unstable Walser, as it is the Brother’s Quay. Much of Walser’s literary output was pieced together from arcane scrawlings and coded messages (known by his enthusiastic followers as ‘Bleistiftgebiet’ or ‘Microscripts’) put to paper during his long stays in the Waldou sanatorium. At the time regarded as mere ramblings, it wasn’t until the 1970’s that Walser became recognized as a key voice of Modernism, along with Bruno Schulz (‘Street of Crocodiles’ & ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’).

We enter the Institute with Gottfried John, who seeks to learn ‘the divine duty of the servant’, along with a band of oddball potential butlers and waiters. Headmistress to these submissives is Alice Krige (yes, ST:TNG’s Borg Queen) who positively vibrates like a tuning fork dressed in a pure white corset whilst clutching a quite worrying riding crop that appears to be made from a goat’s hoof. Krige floats about her scenes with a preternatural grace, small traces of ecstatic electricity emerging in flickers across her powerfully emotive features.. or are they merely blank? Curious how so many of the great cinematic performances are upon closer inspection so subtle as to be ghostly in terms of analysis..

Given the film’s clear associations with German Expressionist Cinema, the obvious parallel is with Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl, with it’s sado-masochistic-lesbian Fraulein holding sway over The Home for Lost Girls’. Whilst Pabst chose the Avant-garde dancer Valeska Gert for the role (probably the single most disturbing performance of the entire Silent period) dominating her female charges, here in contrast we have the strikingly beautiful Alice Krige (though no less elemental a force) controlling male supplicants somewhat complicit in their subordinacy to a dominatrix. Also add in for good measure, a dash or two of both the 1931 Maedchen in Uniform, and it’s 50’s remake with Romy Schneider.

 Benjamenta is a prose piece that dwells in a continual dream-state, the world glimpsed giddily through an eternally smokey filter.. how do the Brothers Quay put it? Oh, yes,  through ‘a dusty window pane.’ The lighting really is exquisite, treating Alice Krige like a flood-lit Louise Brooks, or a stoic Dietrich, whilst stepping into a Victorian box of curiosities. Showing a giddy subtlety that Pabst and Josef von Sternberg would have applauded enthusiastically.

‘I should never let myself be rescued.. nor shall I ever rescue anybody.’

 “I am dying from the emptiness of cautious and clever people.”

‘The divine duty of servants..’

‘Sometimes more life dwells in the opening of a door than in a question. Past and future circle about us. Now we know more.. now we know less.’

“This is freedom,’ said the instructress, ‘it’s something very wintry, and cannot be borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it. That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away.. watch freedom dying, if you open your eyes…” ( Robert Walser)

“With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.” (Robert Walser)

STILLS

 

~ Alice Krige (b. 28th Jun, 1954) Cape Province, South Africa ~

Atonement (2007) : Imagery

ATONEMENT : Smoke & Mirrors

James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Benedict Cumberbatch, Gina McKee, Romola Garai, Juno Temple, Brenda Blethyn, Alfie Allen, Patrick Kennedy, Vanessa Redgrave / From the novel by Ian McEwan / Soundtrack  Dario Marianelli /  Editing Paul Tothill / Art Direction Ian Bailie / Production Design Sarah Greenwood / Cinematography Seamus McGarvey / Production Tim Bevan / Director Joe Wright

Despite the Surgeon General’s wise warnings, cigarettes are a wonderful visual tool. Film Noir must have smoked it’s collective way through enough tobacco to block out the sun, but modern cinema likes it’s products nicotine free these days.. Lauren Bacall may have looked sexy mouthing clouds of chesterfield’s finest floating into strategically placed spotlights, but you won’t catch Nicole or Cate puffing on a roll-up. The old jiggery-pokery of smoke and mirrors to enhance the beauty of the modern Dietrichs & Garbos has been replaced with CGI & madame botox. Atonement marks a comforting return to form though, bathing Keira Knightley in luxuriantly defiant monsoons of haze. And though it’s not at all difficult to make Keira look appealing on film, the loss in clarity is an apt visual metaphor. The entire story is distorted through the narrator’s eyes, from both her youthful perceptions of events, to her adult, selective recollections of the past. So the filtering of visuals through smoke, mirrors, glass, water.. add to the film’s dreamlike character, painting an ever shifting picture, dropping in and out of focus at heights of sensuality, or obscuring views where details are less than certain.

There is of course an attempt to be authentic to the time period by including these smoking scenes, as with the machine gun delivery of the speech (if Keira sounds at all unbelievable, listen to Celia Johnson in either ‘Brief Encounter’ or ‘In Which we Serve’ to convince), but above all it’s more of a stylistic devise. Keira’s long, tapering, art nouveau fingers, and angular looks lend themselves so well to such Pre-Raphaelite displays, reminiscent of the young Katherine Hepburn, and neatly slipping into Helena Bonham Carter’s Period drama shoes. I’ll not bother to go into the whole phallic argument with regards to cigarettes, as it really is a tired old simplistic observation.

‘Sometimes a cigar is indeed just a cigar’.

‘The 1935 section of the film has a fairytale quality to it. The reds are very red, there’s a magical quality to it, and a part of that is emphasising Briony’s imagination. Briony is very much a character who lives in her own head. She’s a writer, she’s constantly inventing stories and she puts all the people around her into those stories, and that’s when tragedy occurs.The 30s and 40s were the pinnacle of the stiff upper lip and that very famous British emotional repression, and it was really interesting to look at that with Cecilia. She can’t express what she’s feeling, and therefore this rage is constantly bubbling underneath her which explodes, perhaps, in the library scene [she smiles]. It had to be incredibly erotic and passionate because you have to believe that these people waited three years without seeing each other based on that moment. It was incredibly important that you get that tension between Cecilia and Robbie because it’s certainly not really spoken about, it’s about what’s not being said..’

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY BBC INTERVIEW 2007

STILLS & PRODUCTION

(i)

(ii)

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TRAILER

The New Wave preoccupation with the cigarette..